Williams, C. K

New York. 2000. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374199841. 170 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Susan Mitchell. keywords: Memoir Autobiography Poetry Literature America . FROM THE PUBLISHER - ‘My father, has been dead a long time, my mother a brief ten years less. I imagine them now side by side, in their coffins, in their graves. Strange to visualize all the couples under the tireless lid of the earth, sledding on their backs together through space and time, always as though patiently waiting to move toward one another to come together again or at last, as though to begin another journey.' MISGIVINGS is C. K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, inner conflict, and, finally, love. Like Kafka's self-revealing LETTER TO HIS FATHER, MISGIVINGS is full of doubt, both philosophical and personal, but as a work of art it is sure and true. Williams's father was an ‘ordinary businessman' - angry, demanding, addicted to the tension he created with the people he loved; a man who could recite the Greek myths to his son yet vowed never to apologize to anybody. Williams's mother, was a housewife, a woman with a great capacity for pleasure, who was stoical about the family's dire early poverty yet remained affected by it even when they became well-off. Together, these two formed what Williams calls the ‘conspiracy that made me who I am.' His account of their life together and of their deaths - his father's in a final abandonment of the will to live, his mother's with calm resignation - is a literary form of the reconciliation the family achieved at the end of his parents' lives, composed as a series of brilliant short takes, a double helix of experience and recollection. Few contemporary writers have understood their origins so acutely, or so eloquently. ‘A poet's knowing intuition and memory inform this book, which, page by page, turns into a gift of psychological and moral wisdom - a writer's journey toward awareness becomes a reader's responsive experience.' - Robert Coles. inventory #19588 ISBN: 0374199841.